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  • From Globalization to Global History
  • Maxine Berg (bio)

Geoff Eley's 'Historicizing the Global' engages critically with the concept of globalization as a part of the history of a process of accelerating and intensifying world integration. In recent years there has been a 'time-space compression' which has, he argues, advanced US geopolitical aims to reorder the Middle East and to contain China. Eley seeks to historicize this process. He cites Wallerstein, Cooper and Hobsbawm on earlier periods of globalized world orders, noting the lack of historical specifics of globalization. He seeks to recast Marxist accounts of capitalist accumulation with his own 'grand-scale periodization'. This emphasizes slavery and servitude as fundamental to capitalist development. Histories of capitalism, he argues, have not incorporated regimes of unfree labour into accounts of the rise of wage labour and the working class. They have also given undue significance to industrial production in manufacturing as the high point of capitalism. He seeks to reassert the place of global interactions, founded especially in Atlantic-world slavery, in the first industrialization of the West. And he finds contemporary parallels in the globalized labour markets of the twenty-first century, subject to 'stripped-down' labour contracts and in other cases to forms of coercion. Yet for all this, his analysis focuses on the West, with remarkably little sense of wider global history.

The case for the role of slavery in generating the profits of the plantation complex, and the part these played in British capital-formation over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is no new one. The evidence for this, gathered by many generations of economic historians, was recently assembled by Joseph Inikori in his Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England,1 not cited among Eley's references to slavery. Neither has the place of servants been so entirely overlooked by historians as Eley conveys. He argues that servants were one of the largest working categories of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century; and non-industrial work, service and domestic labour were central, not peripheral to capitalist development. He draws on Carolyn Steedman's recent research on eighteenth-century servants. Service was one of the key labour categories of early modern England, covering contracts in agriculture and industry as well as 'domestic service'. Attempts to measure the number of servants, to define what work they did and their place in family and household life cycles have shaped our understanding of seventeenth and eighteenth-century gender and social history.2 Servants encompassed far more than those [End Page 335] engaged in household domestic work, and it is never easy to disentangle such labour from other economic activities of the household.

What is more significant for our understanding of labour in the process of capitalist accumulation in the eighteenth century is the nature of the labour contract. Plantation slave-labour formed one component. Another was the widespread use of the service contract in agriculture and industry as well as domestic household work. Indentured servants and transported convicts fuelled the labour needs of New World colonies and later Australia. A servant in seventeenth-century Virginia was 'a thing, a commodity with a price', 'to be bought and sold, or even gambled for'. But servants 'were not slaves . . . They had hopes of freedom and even of advancement if they survived . . .'.3 The Masters and Servants law in England, as Douglas Hay has argued in publications going back to the 1970s, was used in hiring-contracts in agriculture and industry throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Far more important than the Combination Laws, it was extensively used in the heavy industrial regions of the Midlands, and many cases were brought against women.4 The use of the Masters and Servants law along with penal sanctions for breach of contract by workers increased significantly over the course of the eighteenth century, coinciding with an intensification of labour inputs of up to thirty per cent. The last Master and Servant law was repealed in 1875, but it was still cited up to the 1970s. Other forms of constrained labour included apprenticeship, especially pauper apprenticeship, and debt bondage. T. S. Ashton in a classic study of the Northern filemaker, Peter...

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